At the End of the Tunnel
by theslytherinrose
Summary: While searching for their son during the Battle of Hogwarts, Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy inadvertently reach the Shrieking Shack and locate someone else. (AU, one-shot, wishful thinking in light of the loss of a great actor.)


**A/N: I wrote this for a friend after we heard about the loss of Alan Rickman. I know Snape's fate is an integral part of the story, but for the sake of wishful thinking, I wanted to provide an alternative.**

* * *

The fighting had spilled out onto the castle's grounds, now, but no matter how large of an area they covered while dodging curses from both sides in their search, Narcissa and Lucius appeared no closer to locating their son. As they ran through the darkness, bursts of green light exploding around them, one thought echoed through Narcissa's mind: _We have to find Draco. We have to find Draco._

Narcissa let out a panicked cry as her foot snagged on a tree root and her ankle twisted beneath her, sending her crashing toward the ground. She released Lucius's hand to avoid dragging him down with her, and his alarmed shout of her name reached her at the same moment she slipped into a hole she hadn't realized the tangle of roots had been concealing. She threw out her hands to catch herself, and her palms slammed into the dirt.

" _Narcissa!_ Are you all right?"

She looked up from the place her face had nearly impacted on the ground and examined the area surrounding her. It appeared to be a tunnel—a very small, cramped one, but a tunnel nonetheless—that led away from the school.

"I'm fine," she called, glancing over her shoulder toward the hole through which she'd fallen. Her husband was leaning over it, and in what little light reached them from the battle raging beyond the tree, she saw the fear in his expression ease slightly. "Lucius, it's a tunnel. It leads away from the castle. Do you think—is it possible that—?"

Lucius inhaled deeply, his shoulders rising with the breath. "Perhaps. If he was trying to get away, he might've gone through, if he knew about it. But this is the Whomping Willow, Cissy—someone's immobilized it, but we don't know for how long. We can't stay here."

"Then come down here." The words left her lips before she'd fully considered them, part of a half-formed plan that she knew was a desperate attempt at clinging to whatever method of searching might lead them to their son. "It's worth a try, isn't it? Anything we can do, anywhere we can look that he might be, we have to keep looking, we have to—"

Lucius had climbed into the tunnel as Narcissa spoke, and she paused at the touch of his hand on hers in the near-darkness.

"Yes," he said. "Go ahead, and I'll be right behind you."

A relieved sigh escaped Narcissa's mouth, and she nodded. "Thank you."

She began to drag herself forward. For the first time in her life, Narcissa Malfoy found herself crawling through the dirt on her knees, her robes snagging on roots and stones and other things she couldn't see after the light from outside had faded and left nothing but the blackness of the tunnel, but she didn't care. She would do whatever was necessary to find her son, even if it meant searching thousands of dirty, narrow tunnels with no idea where they led. But at least she wouldn't have to search them alone. She knew Lucius would be with her no matter where the search led or how much time it consumed. As everything else crumbled around them, each of them had two things remaining—the other and Draco—and neither Lucius nor Narcissa would allow harm to come to their family while they breathed.

The sounds of battle faded the longer the two moved through the tunnel, and they were left with only the noises of their own breathing. Narcissa had no idea how long had passed as she crawled onward, her palms and knees aching from the prolonged contact with the ground, but eventually, the space in front of her broadened. She pulled herself upright in a dingy room with a wooden floor that creaked with the first step she took out of the tunnel, and then she reached backward to help Lucius to his feet.

"Where are we?" she breathed.

"I don't—look. There. Is that—?"

Without finishing his question, Lucius strode quickly forward into the room, and Narcissa followed him with her eyes, realizing for the first time that they were not alone. Lying on the floor in a pool of what was unmistakably blood, puncture wounds at his throat and his body unmoving, was Severus Snape.

Narcissa started toward him. Her son was not here, no, but the man who had endangered his own life by entering with her an Unbreakable Vow to protect him was, and from the pallor of his skin, Severus was very near the end of his life, if he had not reached it already. Narcissa knelt at his side, the blood saturating the floorboards seeping onto her robes as she leaned over him and staining her pale fingers as she pressed them to his throat to check his pulse.

Lucius leaned over beside her, glancing from Severus to Narcissa and back again. "Is he…?"

She said nothing for a long moment, her fingertips searching for any sign of life that might linger within the man she'd long considered a friend.

There.

It was a faint, almost unnoticeable heartbeat, but it was a beat nonetheless, and when she felt it beneath her skin, Narcissa let out a heavy breath.

"Alive," she said. "Just barely. He's hardly breathing." _What did this to him?_ she wanted to ask, but she feared she already knew the answer. The wounds at Severus's throat had been made unmistakably by the teeth of a serpent, and a large one. _So the Dark Lord finally turned on him, too,_ she thought bitterly. In the Dark Lord's eyes, she knew her family had outlived its usefulness, and it appeared that the same was true of the dying man before her.

"Here."

Narcissa looked up to see Lucius holding out a wand in her direction.

"It was on the floor," he said. "Probably his. Is there anything you can do? You've healed me enough times, I believe you can help him."

"I… can try." Narcissa wished she could muster more conviction in the words, but she'd never dealt with injuries this severe. Still, she had to make the attempt. She took the wand and began muttering every healing charm she'd ever learned, racking her brain to call as many spells as she could to the forefront of her memory. She closed her eyes as she worked, focusing the entirety of her energy on saving this man who had once risked his life to save her son.

Several minutes passed in stillness apart from the creaking of the old building and the mumbling of spells, and then, like an explosion, came a great, shuddering gasp for breath, and Narcissa's eyes snapped open to see Severus's face contorting in what had to be agony. The wounds at his throat were sealed, though faint marks remained to indicate where they'd been, and his flesh and robes were stained with blood.

But he was visibly breathing, now, and the knot in Narcissa's chest had begun to unclench.

"It's all right," she said quietly. "You're going to be all right."


End file.
